East Lansing — There Alessio Milivojevic stood at a junior day event for Northwestern’s football team. Head coach Pat Fitzgerald came up to him and shook the Wheaton St. Francis quarterback’s hand. Little did they know that handshake was the foreshadow of what was to come just a few wild years later.
After Jonathan Smith’s staff flipped Milivojevic right before signing day in 2023, and after Smith’s firing ushered Fitzgerald back to the sidelines, now at Michigan State, in December, the two are at the forefront of Michigan State’s rebuild after four losing seasons.
“It’s really crazy. Really crazy,” Milivojevic said.
A couple of Chicago guys, and that won’t change in the future at Michigan State, because Fitzgerald plans to recruit the area frequently alongside the other fertile grounds his mentor and Spartan icon, Mark Dantonio, used to harvest.
“Developing players, developing a program, developing recruiting is all about relationships,” Fitzgerald said Feb. 4. “And I think it’s huge. It’s going to be an area, again, when we leave the state of Michigan, we’re going to be in Ohio. We’re going to be in Indiana, be in Pennsylvania, we’re going to be in Illinois, focused in Chicago. And the reception was awesome in all those areas.”
Homecomings, in a way, for both Fitzgerald and Michigan State.
“When I was in Cleveland, one of the coaches said to me, where you been? And I said, high school,” Fitzgerald said. “No, he goes, where’s the Spartans been?”
Sweet home, Chicago
Fitzgerald’s years in the Big Ten as a player, assistant and head coach give him plenty of connections around the Midwest. Nowhere is he more connected than Chicago. Even Milivojevic knew that growing up.
“Being from the Chicago area, everyone knows who Coach Fitz is,” the quarterback said. “He’s pretty renowned around there. So everyone has great things to say.”
From 2006 to 2023 before his firing amid a hazing scandal (he settled a lawsuit for wrongful termination out of court), Fitzgerald recruited 428 freshmen. And 108 of them came from Illinois with a focus on Chicago. Seven of those players came from Loyola Academy alone, where he spent the past three seasons as an offensive analyst helping a new coach, Beau Desherow, set up his program after years as an assistant under John Holocek.
“I had heard, I think through mutual friends, that he might be interested in volunteering, and he actually called me and asked if I could use his help,” Desherow told The Detroit News. “And you know, this is my 22nd year at Loyola, but that first year was my first year as head coach, and I definitely welcomed the opportunity to have him come help us out.”
Fitzgerald jumped right in to coach the scout team offense — “the least glamorous role” says Desherow — and immediately gelled with the players. Two of them were his sons, so yeah there was some familiarity there. But Fitzgerald also gave a “master class in football” whenever asked by his fellow coaches. He just stayed busy, even unloading trailers of equipment and picking up trash on the sidelines.
“Just a very humble person, you know, just kind of a salt-of-the-earth type of guy,” Desherow said. “His passion for the game of football and his passion for educating young people through the game of football is second to none. I’ve never been around someone that has his energy, it’s infectious.”
“If you’re going to go on a sabbatical and you get the opportunity to be with two of your boys,” Fitzgerald said at his introductory press conference in December, “while they go through back-to-back state championships. One is a quarterback, goes 25-1, and all those kids, it was awesome. I became a much better teacher.”
And every game Loyola Academy played, Fitzgerald ran into someone he knew. Whether that was conference games or playoff runs during back-to-back 8A Illinois state championships.
“He knew every single head coach and had some form of relationship with those coaches,” Desherow said. “And it was just really remarkable to see just his recall on kids — maybe kids that he didn’t even recruit or maybe he did recruit, or kids that he had.”
Returning to fertile grounds
Fitzgerald only had a few short weeks in December and early January to finish early signing day, put together his coaching staff, handle the transfer portal and start recruiting players for the next cycle. And when he got to step four, he started back in familiar stomping grounds in Chicago.
One of his early targets was quarterback Israel Abrams, who committed to Miami (Florida) earlier this month. Fitzgerald went to Montini Catholic himself to make the connection at a program he’d picked up five commitments from in the past.
“One of the interesting things about that is only one of them was offered a scholarship out of high school, and four of them walked on and subsequently earned scholarship,” Montini coach Mike Bukovsky told The Detroit News. “So his word has always been golden to us, and he’s just a high-character person, and I think he’s one of the better guys in this game, to be honest with you.”
One of those walk-ons Michigan State fans may remember: Joe Spivak, who was a two-star defensive lineman Mark Dantonio recruited in the 2017 cycle. He turned down a Michigan State offer for the chance to play for Fitzgerald, notching 31 tackles and 1½ sacks over four seasons. He wore the No. 1 jersey as a senior captain in 2021. Now, he’s on the WWE NXT circuit as the wrestler Tank Ledger, part of the tag team Hank and Tank with former Atlanta Falcons offensive lineman Hank Walker. That had Bukovsky and Fitzgerald joking about their own tag team.
“We were laughing about that,” Bukovsky said. “And Joe was just an unbelievable ball of energy and a great, great young man. Great leader.”
So is Fitzgerald. Bukovsky remembers going to one clinic and Fitzgerald had a bunch of his teeth replaced. He’d had a mishap in practice:
“He jumped in to show one of his receivers something on the JUGS machine, and boof, got biffed right in the mouth with a football. He was talking about it and laughing about it.”
What made Fitzgerald so endearing to players was his blunt honesty — a guiding principle found in the assistant coaches he brought on to his staff at Michigan State, too.
“He was a man of his word, and he didn’t use people, he didn’t lie to people,” Bukovsky said. “He didn’t oversell people. He said, listen, this is where we’re at right now. We’re interested in you. We love you as a player, and obviously, as a person. You do your job here, and you’ll get an opportunity and we will take care of you in the future.”
Fitzgerald isn’t a salesman, and that makes pitches resonate. Coaches around the Chicago area, who had many of the same players as young men, share a feeling Fitzgerald squeezes a lot of football out of his guys, and he makes them the best players they can be. That’s why he could win so many games at Northwestern, going 110-101 with five bowl wins in 17 years (he was 4-20 his final two seasons coming off a top-10 finish in 2020).
“I think he’s going to have, really, an opportunity to be successful,” Bukovsky said. “Because I think he’s smart enough to continue to exploit some of these areas here, and get in here and still influence kids.”
‘That’s … going to be our focus here’
It’s evident Chicago will remain a priority in Michigan State’s recruitment map, though it hasn’t been represented yet in Michigan State’s first five commitments. So far, two are from Michigan, two are from Ohio and one is from New Jersey. Give it time through the spring recruitment window.
This class of recruits will be an important one for Fitzgerald, beyond simply being his first at-bat. In an era of the transfer portal, Fitzgerald wants to build a solid foundation of high school recruits who’ll stay with the program. That’s the synthesis of observations he drew in those three seasons at Loyola Academy, his “learning sabbatical.”
This winter, Michigan State didn’t have a choice but to draw 31 transfers in order to fill a roster. It’s going to take some time to build a stable, but he feels that the era of Dantonio — who’s around the program more than he was Fitzgerald’s predecessor — is a good example of what his program may look like.
“When you look back at when this program was where it should be, that’s a top-10 football program,” Fitzgerald said. “Coach D — obviously I studied intimately when I was competing against him — and how he built his rosters. It’s not going to be too far removed from that model. And obviously we’ll go anywhere to get players that fit us and want to be here. But really that’s kind of going to be our focus here, especially here in this class.”
cearegood@detroitnews.com
@ConnorEaregood
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Pat Fitzgerald keeping Chicago roots at Michigan State
Reporting by Connor Earegood, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
